On the surface, this sounds like a crazy idea. Who would want to saw off the branch he is sitting on? However, the greatest entrepreneurial successes do not always come from preserving a working model at all costs but from the ability to question it, sometimes to the point of destroying it.
Sabotaging your own business model is not playing the sorcerer’s apprentice. On the contrary, it is a subtle art, that of anticipating what others will end up doing if you do not do it yourself. It’s daring to reinvent yourself before being forced to do so. And it is perhaps one of the most valuable skills a leader can cultivate in a world where obsolescence spares no one.
When success becomes a trap
Success is reassuring. It reassures the manager in his choices, it builds customer loyalty, it attracts talent. But it also establishes a form of dangerous comfort. By believing that a solid model will always remain solid, many companies find themselves trapped by their own inertia.
Kodak is the most famous example. The undisputed leader in film photography, the company had nevertheless invented the digital camera… but preferred to bury it to protect its economic model based on film. Result: others rushed into the breach, and Kodak collapsed. Blockbuster, another fallen giant, had the opportunity to buy Netflix for a pittance. Its leaders judged that video on demand did not represent a serious threat. Ten years later, the last Blockbuster store closes its doors while Netflix dominates the planet.
These stories have become textbook cases. They remind us that the danger does not always come from competitors but from the difficulty in questioning what works. Success creates an emotional and financial attachment to a model, to the point of making intentional sabotage almost unthinkable.
Sabotage to survive
Sabotaging your own business model means agreeing to disrupt an equilibrium before the market does. This requires courage, because the figures, the customers, the teams often shout the opposite: why touch what works? However, it is precisely because it works that we must dare.
Apple has understood this several times. The company did not hesitate to cannibalize its own iPod by launching the iPhone, even though the music player represented a major part of its revenues. It also abandoned the floppy disk drive, then the CD drive, well before the majority of users were ready. Each time, it took the risk of sabotaging its existing model to create a new one, and each time it strengthened its position.
Amazon follows a similar logic. Its initial core business, selling books online, could have remained a thriving niche. But Jeff Bezos preferred to launch the marketplace, then the cloud with AWS, two innovations which redefined his model and ensured his domination. The art of deliberate sabotage is obvious here: destroying a comfortable source of income to open up a much larger one.
The role of the leader: architect of change
For such sabotage to be possible, vision is required. The leader must agree to play against himself, to jeopardize part of his achievements to ensure the future. It is an uncomfortable but essential position: that of the architect of change rather than the guardian of the temple.
The difficulty lies in the fact that business, by nature, tends to preserve what works. Operational teams optimize, financiers secure, salespeople exploit. The role of the manager is to introduce some creative disorder, to ask the disturbing questions: what if our product became free? What if tomorrow an external player offered the same service ten times cheaper? What if our distribution channel disappeared?
These questions are not intellectual whims. They force us to project ourselves into the scenarios that the market could impose. They force you to imagine how you would react if a competitor imposed a break, and therefore to consider imposing it yourself.
Weak signals of disruption
Knowing when to sabotage your model is not easy. But certain weak signals can alert you. The rapid evolution of uses, for example. When consumers begin to massively adopt a new behavior, it is often too late to react. The first signs of tipping should be taken seriously.
Technology is another indicator. Rarely neutral, it profoundly disrupts existing models. Those who see an innovation as a gadget are often the ones who wake up too late. History is full of leaders who underestimated the importance of the Internet, the smartphone, artificial intelligence or social networks.
Finally, margins that are too comfortable are sometimes a sign that a model is ripe for disruption. If your customers are paying a lot for a service that could tomorrow be automated or simplified, be sure that someone, somewhere, is working on this simplification.
Organized sabotage or controlled chaos
Sabotage your own business model does not mean acting out of order. It is a process that can be thought out, structured, even ritualized. Some companies create internal laboratories, autonomous subsidiaries or incubators responsible for experimenting freely. These structures, detached from the core business, have the explicit mission of questioning what has been achieved.
Others prefer a more integrated approach: encouraging each team to imagine what could make their work obsolete, and to work on that hypothesis. In both cases, the idea is to transform fear into a driver of innovation.
It is striking to note that companies that practice this voluntary sabotage do not collapse: they regenerate. They let part of their model die in order to be better reborn elsewhere. Like a permanent molt, which certainly requires energy and courage, but which allows you to stay alive.
The test of the ego and the short term
The main barrier to sabotage is not technology or the market, it is the leader himself. To recognize that your model is doomed to disappear is to admit that your genius of yesterday will not be enough for tomorrow. Many refuse this observation, prisoners of their ego or their emotional attachment to a past success.
Added to this is short-term pressure. Investors, shareholders, sometimes even teams, want immediate results. Strategic sabotage often creates a temporary drop in revenue and a loss of direction. It takes an exceptional capacity for conviction and leadership to navigate this zone of turbulence.
